“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” — Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims” — Abdulrahman al-Rashed, BBC News

Our language has been having rocks thrown in its gearbox for close to a century now. First, from the Critical Theory1 fucknuts that sprang up in the decadent nightclub culture of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic in the interlude between the two World Wars. One would assume it was a schizoid hyper-reaction to try and come to terms with, and explain, the brutish idiocy of the Nazis they were allowing to waltz in and seize society in a totalitarian death-grip with barely a murmur of protest. (more…)

“Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account and if necessary amend their own case accordingly. They do not present as genuine documents those that they know to be forged just because these forgeries happen to back up what they are saying. They do not invent ingenious but implausible and utterly unsupported reasons for distrusting genuine documents because these documents run counter their arguments; again, they amend their arguments if this is the case, or abandon them altogether. They do not consciously attribute their own conclusions to books and other sources which, in fact, on closer inspection, actually say the opposite. They do not eagerly seek out the highest possible figures in a series of statistics, independently of their reliability or otherwise, simply because they want for whatever reason to maximize the figure in question, but rather, they assess all the available figures as impartially as possible in order to arrive at a number that will withstand the critical scrutiny of others. They do not knowingly mistranslate sources in foreign languages to make them more serviceable to themselves. They do not willfully invent words, phrases, quotations, incidents, and events for which there is no historical evidence to make their arguments more plausible to their readers.

“At least, they do not do any of these things if they wish to retain any kind of reputable status as historians.”(more…)

Probably the greatest delusion of the 21st century is that secularism is somehow less insane around its fringes than theism.

And now that 9/11 is being remembered a decade on, it is as inevitable as night following day that the Truthers will come slithering out of their dung piles to rub our noses in their nonsense all over again.

So there is no surprise finding this gem deposited on my ‘tardbook news feed –